Despite Miserable Failure In New York, Nanny Staters Still Pushing Soda Tax
Remember, folks. Being fat is the new smoking. And the we-know-what’s-best-for-you bureaucrats aren’t going to rest until you’re eating and drinking how they think you should eat and drink.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A penny-per-ounce tax on sugary drinks could help fight obesity by cutting consumption and raising billions of dollars to help state and local governments pay for programs, two experts said on Wednesday.
Taxes have been shown to reduce smoking and are just as likely to help adults and children choose healthier drinks, which are now usually more expensive than sodas and other sweetened beverages, the experts wrote in the New England Journal of Medicine
A tax of one penny per fluid ounce (30 ml) on drinks such as soda, sports drinks and sugar-sweetened fruit juice and iced tea could “reduce consumption of sugared beverages by more than 10 percent,” Kelly Brownell of Yale University in Connecticut and New York City Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden wrote.
“It is difficult to imagine producing behavior change of this magnitude through education alone, even if government devoted massive resources to the task.”
What’s amazing is that these policy “experts” have blown right by the most important part of this debate. Which is whether or not the government should be trying to manipulate our eating/drinking behavior.
Does anyone else remember that old movie Demolition Man starring Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes? Stallone’s character gets put in a cyrogenic deep freeze for committing some crime, and wakes up in a utopian future. There’s no crime. No poverty. No suffering. No illness. Everything is perfect. Except that everything sucks too. The government runs everything, and so everything is the same. You eat what the government tells you to eat. You live how the government tells you to live. Again, there’s no illness or crime or anything, but there’s no joi de vive for lack of a better term.
A scene in the movie that sticks with me is Stallone’s character discovering the underworld of dissenters who don’t want to live as the social architects in the mainstream culture tell them too. He’s walking through their slum and spots a burger stand. He immediately purchases a burger and a beer and tears into it. It’s a rat burger, of course, but it doesn’t matter to him. He’s just happy to be eating something that’s not good for him for a change.
Which speaks to a elemental sort of freedom we all feel, doesn’t it? The social engineers seem to want us to eat and drink and generally live a certain way, but isn’t this a free country? As long as we’re not hurting anyone else, shouldn’t we be free to eat and drink as we wish? If someone wants to have cheeseburgers and soda three meals a day, every day, shouldn’t he/she be free to live that way? Sure, they won’t last long like that, but it’s their choice right?
It’s hard to combat government efforts to promote health because health is a good thing. But we should remember that freedom doesn’t just mean being free to make good decisions, but being free to make bad ones too. Because the “good” decisions the government makes for us might make our lives into something we don’t want them to be.
I, for one, would like to just live my life without an endless stream of health bureaucrats out to push me into living a certain way.
